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How To Make Software Projects Fail
Bob Abooey writes: "SoftwareMarketSolution has an interesting interview of Joel Spolsky, of Joel on Software fame. Joel, a former programmer at Microsoft, discusses some of the reasons he thinks some very popular software companies or projects fail, including Netscape, Lotus 123, Borland, etc." This interview brings out some mild boiler-room stories which sound like they could be the basis of a good book, along the lines of Soul of a New Machine .
Show me a government owned power company in the USA.
OK, I'll mention a few: TVA (i.e., Tennesse Valley Authority, which lifted an entire region out of utter abject poverty during the Depression, SoCal's DWP (which not only distributes water and generates power, but also manages to generate power while distributing water), Sacramento's Municipal Utility District (MUD) which generates and distributes most of the power in north-central CA, and finally the BPA (i.e., Bonneville Power Administration) which built and still operates most of the hydroelectric power generation and transmission in the Columbia watershed. The Northwest has a lower cost of living partly due to low power costs (though it isn't guaranteed and it has been rising) and low water costs (likely to continue given near term global warming effects). Water, Power (and soon, Broadband) are _exactly_ the infrastructure investments that our government does well and should control. Private utilities are very vulnerable to economic fluctuations where their executives' self-interest leads them to try foolish deals and daft accounting tricks in search of short-term performance, while government can weather tough quarters (and years) without worrying about the stock analysts.
In case you hadn't noticed, the major private power utilities in California are in bankruptcy and are desperately beseeching the State to bail them out (and might yet stick the tax and rate paying citizens after all, given how cozy their lobbyists have been with the CA PUC, Legislature, and Executive branch fixers, just about forever). One can only hope that the CA government and regulators now realize that the public is watching with interest and will nail them if they screw it up further, so they might fix it properly.
Of course, private utility executives and board members never do get held accountable, nor do their government co-conspirators, but if things were to be really just, there'd be a few of them hung from lamp-posts in San Francisco before this is over. Screwing the public for private gain is just the sort of thing that deserves "extreme prejudice."
Government utilities are a good thing, mostly (WPPS notwithstanding, but that was a _private_ boondoggle admittedly triggered by a BPA error). Private utilities are simply disasters waiting to ripen, explode, and be discovered, unless they are regulated into castrated quasi-governmental entities. The term "private utility" really is an oxymoron.